Based on initial feedback collected in 2011, updated regulations for CASL have been published by the Industry Canada. Interested stakeholders have until February 4, 2013 to comment on the proposed regulations.
Edit: to identify correct Canadian Govt Agency (Thanks, Neil!)
The EU has published consumer protection directives. Members states have 2 years to implement and enforce these directives.
The interesting bit is this:
There is quite a bit of vocal opposition to the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) making its way through the House of Representatives and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) making its way through the Senate. The opposition seems to have had an effect. I blogged about the bills late last year.
CNet reported today that the DNS provision was pulled from SOPA. This resolves one, but certainly not the only problem with SOPA. Also today, OpenCongress.org posted a letter from 6 co-sponsors of the Senate bill to Majority Leader Reid asking him to cancel the vote on PIPA.
Congratulations to everyone who worked so hard to make their voice heard by their elected representatives.
Al has a guest post from Kevin Huxham of CakeMail talking about how a majority of people surveyed don’t know anything about the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation.
I have to admit, I’ve not talked about CASL very much here as I’ve been waiting for the implementation and rulemaking. Unfortunately, the implementation date has been pushed back again and again and it doesn’t look like the law will be in effect until 2013.
CASL takes an incredibly narrow look at permission. It prohibits any commercial mail sent without the recipient’s consent to email addresses, social networking accounts and phones (SMS). Not only that, it also prohibits adddress harvesting and installation of computer programs without consent of the owner of the computer.
This law affects all email sent to a Canadian citizens and does allow for private right of action.
I know that a lot of companies that market in Canada have been working out permission issues before the law takes effect. They are also looking at how to comply with the permission requirements for addresses collected after the law goes into effect.
One of the challenges of this law is going to be identifying what addresses are covered. In some cases senders will have physical addresses, but they’re not going to have physical addresses for all addresses. And that may mean that CASL will actually impact more that just Canadian residents.